You took the words right out of my mouth. Not that I'd have used the orignal snippet as an example of beautiful code...

It's time we snap out of this. If a maintainer can't understand code as simple as this, it's time for him to get educated. People should stop wasting time writing verbose code, and learn more elegant ways to do the same things. It's time they start to learn to recognize the typical Perl idioms, and stop trying to write a shadow of C in Perl.

"simple" and understandable? It's verbose, it's ugly, it's impossible to read, and the only reason why people think it's readable is because they have learned to read it. And to be honest, it probably took them a relative long of time to learn it.